Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro introduces the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, a Lojong practice from the Indian master Dharmarakshita, transmitted through Atisha to Tibet. She clarifies bodhicitta—the aspiration to achieve enlightenment for all beings—and identifies self-cherishing as the primary obstacle to genuine love and compassion. The text’s central image is the peacock: just as peacocks thrive on poisonous plants that would harm other birds, bodhisattvas can remain amid circumstances that ordinarily provoke attachment and aversion, transforming them into fuel for practice. Khadro explains how Yamāntaka, the wrathful deity invoked in the homage, symbolizes the transformation of anger into enlightened action. She walks through the opening verses distinguishing the brave bodhisattva from the ordinary practitioner. For those familiar with Lojong teachings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 The wheel of sharp weapons.mp3
UUID: c154aa32-4b7d-4993-a300-8ac5bd89a6c7
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: The Wheel of Sharp Weapons 42 – 154 (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Date: 1999 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.0 minutes
Words: ~5,359
Just set our motivation, and we can set it for the whole series of this talk as well as just at the night. And think that we’re engaged the the the enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. Our own enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings so as to be able to lead them to the state of everlasting happiness. So last week I started talking last week but there weren’t very many people here and also didn’t get taped but it didn’t really matter much because in actual fact we didn’t really get on to the topic of the actual text anyway. We were just going through some sort of preliminary talk about the strength of mainly about the strength of our deluded mental states and how these keep us in suffering and how they keep us from achieving the state of enlightenment that we’re trying to attain for the welfare of sentient beings.
Beings and so we need a really strong effective method to overcome these and so we were talking about the Mahāyāna thought training practices and how have these various practices that have come down to us from the great pundits of India and the great Tibetan lamas who have composed these teachings on the basis of Buddha’s Mahāyāna teachings so as to help us and these thought trainings are called Lojong in Tibetan and they they go in conjunction with the graduated path. So you need to have the graduated path understanding and it’s very very helpful to practice these Lojong teachings in conjunction with the graduated path and they help us to overcome our deluded mental states and in particular they help us to cultivate love and compassion and the state of mind of bodhicitta. So who wants to explain what bodhicitta is and how it differs from love and compassion? Right. Because body really means more like awakening or enlightenment.
Yes. Titter is mind. The way it’s sometimes expressed is in terms of the four immeasurables but here it has: may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness, so that’s love; may they be free of suffering and the causes of suffering, that refers to compassion, great love and great compassion. May all beings never be separated from happiness and may they have no suffering. So that’s actually, yeah, the source of things have been not only having happiness of the worldly nature, but having the ultimate happiness, liberation.
So the thought of bodhicitta comes from combining this great love and compassion with the thought that I myself will bring that about. Sometimes you find particularly when you’re doing Lojong practices, there’s a little prayer that we make where we actually say that I myself am going to bring this about. All different methods could be applied to achieve enlightenment and I myself am going to to do it. So and and it also has to involve the understanding that if you’re going to do this, you have to attain enlightenment. So it’s the motivation of working for enlightenment.
That’s why the the word body comes into it because it’s the aspiration to attain enlightenment that it’s not of your own welfare, but of the welfare of others. So this is the motivation for all these Mahāyāna teachings. And so we we need something really powerful because although we have these thoughts, these aspirations, the the self-cherishing is really, really strong, and it’s very hard to overcome. And so self-cherishing and cherishing others are contradictory. You can’t have both of them in your mind stream at the same time.
So we need we find that our self-cherishing keeps on arising spontaneously and prevents us from developing real pure love and compassion. Although we do have love and compassion, we shouldn’t think we’re totally devoid of these qualities, but our love and compassion is still limited and partial. We have more towards some beings than towards others. And also it tends to fade out whenever self-cherishing becomes particularly strong. And so we have to overcome self-cherishing so that we can build on the love and compassion that we have now and develop the the great pure love and compassion, which are the basis for going on to develop bodhicitta.
And so we have these various thought trainings, and there’s quite a number of them. The one that we’re dealing with at the moment is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and I thought that might be an interesting one to go through. And actually, Khensur Rinpoche apparently did teach this one a couple of years ago, but I haven’t been able to find the tapes on it. Well, I did look in the library. Well, I’ll have to listen more to say something.
Maybe they haven’t been catalogued. Catalogued. So, anyway, when I had the thought of doing this, I didn’t know Khensur Rinpoche had taught it, but I would imagine that most of you would not have been present at that teaching anyway. So it’s no problem then because it’s good to hear this. Of course, it would be better to hear it from Khensur Rinpoche himself, but in any case, we can listen to the tapes if we can manage to get them on tape.
So it’s it’s a very powerful teaching. The the title actually gives you that that idea of the the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. It’s it suggests that you’ve got something that’s pretty forceful and effective. And Wheel of Sharp Weapons is something which is being directed at self-cherishing. We have to see self-cherishing as the real enemy and strike at it with effective means and this teaching gives us some good practices to help us to do that, Some good techniques.
Also, it has a lot to do with karma which was, one reason why I had the thought of using this particular particular text because some of these students last year were saying that they would like some more karmic information and particularly examples like the yeah, the football coach in the United States, football, who had instant karma from speaking out of turn. Yes. Yes. So he obviously I said I I was saying the other night yesterday, I was saying to the people who were here yesterday, the lesson we can take a lesson from that, and that is that you have to be very careful how you speak about karma to people who don’t accept karmic teachings. And he particularly using the word punishment which is going to upset people anyway.
It’s very judgmental for the word and karma isn’t about punishment at all. And also people who aren’t familiar with karma aren’t going to take very kindly and even people who do accept karma, there’s a lot of people now with the new age movement and so on, there’s a lot of people around who do have some sort of acceptance of come, but they have also quite a few misleading ideas about the workings of karma. And so it’s always necessary when we’re talking about these things to get to people in general to to be diplomatic, I suppose, the way we express ourselves. So This is a text by a pundit called Dharmarakshita who was one of Atisha’s teachers. So I don’t know whether you all heard the the life story of Atisha.
I did talk about it last few one of the Thursday night gatherings. But, anyway, Atisha was the great Indian teacher who came to Tibet and basically established the teachings firmly in Tibet and showed the Tibetans how it was possible to combine, to coordinate the teachings of Sūtra and Tantra that they were not contradictory but needed to be practiced together and he was very influential in establishing the correct Dharma teachings in Tibetans and in actual fact, he composed the first graduated path text for the Tibetans because they had a great need to to really have things explained at the most basic level. There had been so much confusion caused by by various misleading teachings at that time in Tibet. And so Dharmarakshita was one of Atisha’s Indian teachers. And if you remember the life story of a teacher, you had I forget how many teachers, but over a hundred.
And he was never the the the perfection of his of his correct very devoted to each of his to all of his teachers. So it’s often said that because we don’t have a teacher’s qualities, we need to be careful how many gurus we relate to and if we we’re wise if we limit ourselves to a small number of of gurus. But, anyway, Dharmarakshita was this teacher, and he gave this transmission of these teachings in the form of a text that he composed himself, but, of course, he didn’t invent the thought training. This is something that goes back to Buddha, but he arranged it in the form of a teaching. And it was brought to Tibet by a teacher who passed on the lineage.
And in this text we have a translation from the Tibetans so it came in an Indian language which would have been Sanskrit or a related language came to Tibet and then it came from Tibetan to the English translation which was this one was composed by the the team at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharmasala. And so when he composed this teaching in Sanskrit, Dharmarakshita drew on teachings from all of his gurus and from the teachings that he received in on working with the mind, on training the mind in virtuous conduct and particularly in bodhicitta, then these very effective practices were put together in this text The Wheel of Sharp Weapons and it’s important to remember that all of these texts or what the authors of the text always stress the orthodox origins of the teachings. You’ll never find a true Buddhist teacher saying how original and new and creative their teachings are. They always make a point of saying how they have the correct lineage, how this is the true teachings of Buddha, and how it has been passed on down to them by their teachers. Of course, there is quite a lot of creativity in the way these different teachers are presented from one teacher to from one group of students to another from country to country there has been a lot of adjustment in the way the teachers are presented according to the needs of different people but basics are always the same.
Atisha practiced these teachings himself and found them to be especially effective and so he transmitted them in turn to his chief disciple, Dromtönpa, who is interesting for being the only layperson in the Kadampa lineage. So Dromtönpa passed these teachings on in turn to various to his own students who passed the teachings down and they’ve come down and they were considered to be especially valuable. Atisha particularly transmitted them to Dromtönpa so that he would have this means to pacify the minds of the Tibetans who were difficult to tame. This Tibetans had this reputation of being particularly difficult at that time. So if they could help the Tibetans then they might even work for us Aussies.
So I think our minds are very difficult to tame. Certainly, to compare it to the Tibetans nowadays, we’re difficult to tame. The Tibetans in Atisha’s time, I think that’s in terms of, yes, of of finding it difficult to understand and yes they simply were starting off from scratch. They didn’t have a background of having been brought like they’re they’re very like us now in a sense. They didn’t have a great background of being brought up with Buddhism and they didn’t have a training in Buddhism.
Such training in Buddhism as they did had had been very confusing and had perhaps led to a lot of skepticism among some and a lot of partisanship and a bad feeling of sectarianism among others. And so it was a pretty sad situation at that time. And this just reminds me of little conversation I had with Lama Zopa Rinpoche when I was in Taiwan. He was asking me which students I thought were the better, the Australians and or the Chinese and I can’t tell you how to say very difficult to say really because they they’re different, know. The Australians are good in one way and the Chinese are good in in another and he kept on pushing me and I said, well, if I really had to make it to us, I’d have to say the Chinese.
And he agreed with that. And he said the he was teaching the Chinese, they he only had to tell them that such and such was in scriptures and has been said by such and such a a guru, such and such a teacher, and they would accept it. Whereas the Australians or the Westerners would have to they they they would accept it if if they liked it. It would have to be something that they liked. And so we obviously found that the the Chinese were easier and more receptive, but then it’s it’s natural because the Chinese do have that background of growing up with Buddhism.
So the the full title of the text is a Nayana mind training, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons. And the word mind training in Tibetan is Lojong. So it’s in Tibetan, it’s called a Lojong teaching. So we we go to the first verse. That’s the title.
And then we go to the first verse, verse which is really not verse one but a preliminary verse which is the author’s homage. And he actually gives the title again in a slightly different form. He says the name of this work is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons effectively striking the heart of the foe. So then he goes on, I pay heartfelt homage to you, Yamāntaka. Your wrath is opposed to the great lord of death.
So this homage is to the wrathful devotee in Yamāntaka. Apparently the reason why Dharmarakshita made the homage particularly to Yamāntaka is because this was Dharmarakshita’s special deity. But it’s also appropriate because we have to transform our anger and hatred into the path to enlightenment. And Yamāntaka represents this transformation, the transformation of anger and hatred into this wrathful form of practice on the path to enlightenment. So we’ll be hearing a bit more about Yamāntaka as we go through this text.
And so I thought it would be an idea to have a picture of Yamanaka because you were bound to ask me what Yamāntaka was like. If I didn’t have a picture to show you, I’d be caught out. So I tried to find a picture. I couldn’t find a really good picture and oh, yes. Very scary.
So Yamāntaka basically means overcoming the lord of death, and we’ve got two pictures in here. There’s this one, and then there’s another one in a couple of pages on. And I’ve also got a color picture here. And Tony says that there is a a color picture in one of the books, but the books out. So maybe another time we might be able to find it.
Oh, woah. Would you like to run and get it? Yes. Great. So I’ll pass that around.
Yes. So, anyway, you see he has, what is it? I think sixteen something like sixteen arms. Nine nine faces, sixteen arms, I think it is, thirty two legs. Is it fourteen fourteen arms, think, or something like that?
Sixteen. No. Sixteen, I think. Yes. Lot of legs and very, very fierce looking.
And his main face is a buffalo. Buffalo’s head. Mhmm. Yes. Yes.
Well, that’s a really beautiful picture though, and it gives you the colors. Yes. Wonderful. Yes. So anyway, Khensur Rinpoche is planning to give this initiation sometime in the New Year sometime this year.
So this is the this is the deity that will be involved. So we’ll be here anyway, we’ll be looking more at Yamāntaka as we go through the text. Yes. Okay. You can all see that there.
Might be an idea to put a chair. Oh, I think that’ll be okay. So Yamāntaka anyway is the conqueror of the lord of death because by achieving enlightenment, defeat the Lord of death. If we’re and enlightened beings have power over death. They basically they’ve gone beyond death.
Death is meaningless to them. They might share the aspect passing out their bodies but for them there’s no actual death. So having to die and be born again and again is the mark of Samsāra. This is the situation of all of us and Bodhisattvas take birth again and again from choice. Not the lower Bodhisattvas — they still haven’t managed to get off the wheel — but higher Bodhisattvas have actually gone past the need or the not the need the compulsion to be born again and again under the influence of karma and delusion.
So these two things, karma and deluded mental states as we learn in graduated path teachings that keep us in bondage as they keep us cycling in Samsāra and Bodhisattvas reach a level where they are beyond that but they don’t then just remain in nirvana like like a Hīnayāna practitioner would at that stage. But they keep on taking birth again and again out of their great compassion to keep on working for sentient beings and to keep on working towards complete enlightenment where they will have the the perfect powers to help sentient beings. But these bodhisattvas are not experiencing suffering because their minds have actually transcended the state of bondage to saṃsāra. So although they’re experiencing the physical aspect of death, although they’re going through this aspect of dying, for us that’s a suffering. For that for us, that’s one of the great sufferings.
But for the bodhisattva, it’s there’s no suffering. And they do it voluntarily, and they do it they do these things with great joy. They encounter all the different experiences that beings encountering will be existence with great joy because they’re doing it for the sake of others and because they’ve transcended within their own mind streams the the cause of suffering so they they don’t experience any sort of suffering whatsoever. These greater Bodhisattvas don’t. The lower Bodhisattvas do still experience suffering, but it’s they don’t really they never really feel unhappy because their minds are in a state of happiness because of their joy at working for others and because they’re bearing these hardships for the sake of others and so a Bodhisattva, even the lowest Bodhisattva, they’re experiencing continual happy mental states.
Yamāntaka is carrying a lot of weapons. He’s holding a lot of weapons and although in the pictures that I was looking at it was hard to see very clearly but he’s got thirty four hands, sorry Thirty four hands and sixteen legs. I was getting a bit mixed up there which I’ve got no excuse for that because I knew perfectly well. But Okay, so he has thirty four hands and six their necks but that You know he doesn’t really need to worry about all these things unless you’re taking initiation then you’ll be told to visualize these things but He has oh by the way, that picture I can’t see, is that a solitary hero, Yamāntaka? Or does he have a consort?
Yes. So usually the one that we visualizes is the solitary hero, the one that doesn’t have a consort. But all these pictures, all the pictures I managed to find except for the tiny one are all with consort. But the tiny one on the postcard is the solitary hero. That’s the initiation that’s given most frequently.
So anyway, to get back to Yamāntaka, he has in one of his thirty four hands, he is actually holding holding one of these weapons. And this weapon is something that they used to use in India in ancient India. I said something about that in my notes somewhere, but I seem to have lost the track. Oh, I did talk about that. Okay.
So it’s in the notes that I went through last week. So it’s like a little little circle, a little disc with blades around the edge, maybe three blades, something like that and they were thrown when you got into closer combat when you started to get a bit closer to the to the enemies, then you would throw one of these things at them before coming to actual hand to hand combat with swords or whatever. And so this I’ve I’ve actually seen some of these, think, in the Kathmandu Museum, and they look pretty nasty. And these so apparently, Yamāntaka is holding one of these, and it’s being it’s being used here as the example of a weapon that we have to use to attack self-cherishing and we’re going to be dealing with two wheels of sharp weapons. One is our karma which brings the result of our wrong actions on us.
So that’s what we’re experiencing every time we experience suffering, every time we experience problems, bad conditions, whatever. This is the Wheel of Sharp Weapons and against that we have to offset Yamāntaka’s wheel of skillful actions destroying self-cherishing. And so this is what this teaching is going to help us to do. So any questions up to this point? So that concludes the first verse and that’s the homage which is actually not numbered.
And then we get on to the actual first stanza, stanza one. Jungles of poisonous plants attract the peacocks; the medicine gardens of beauty lie near. The masses of peacocks do not find gardens pleasant but thrive on the essence of poisonous plants. So I’ll go on for a few more verses. In similar fashion, the brave bodhisattvas remain in the jungle of worldly concern.
No matter how joyful this world’s pleasure gardens, these brave ones are never attracted to pleasures but thrive in the jungle of suffering and pain. We spend our whole life in the search for enjoyment yet tremble with fear at the mere thought of pain. Thus since we are cowards we are miserable still but the brave bodhisattvas accept suffering gladly and gain from their courage a true lasting joy. Now desire is the jungle of poisonous plants here. Only brave ones like peacocks can thrive on such fear.
If cowardly beings like crows were to try it because they are greedy, they might lose their lives. So this is a famous analogy from this text. The analogy of the peacocks. We used to have peacocks at Chenrezig Institute and they would eat all sorts of things so I used to think when I used to see them going around and pecking at all different kinds of grasses and plants that probably there are some plants they can eat that are poisonous to to trap human beings or to other animals or maybe to crows and that the Indians would have noticed this, observed this, and taken this analogy from that fact. So it said that the poison actually made their colors more beautiful instead of being poisoned to the peacocks.
They could digest it and it would actually not only be harmful, but it would enhance their beauty. So so the peacocks would actually prefer the poisonous plants and they wouldn’t be interested in the other plants which are considered to be medicinal or beneficial because these plants wouldn’t have the same effect of enhancing their beauty so they choose to stay in the poisonous gardens, in the poisonous pastures or whatever. So the bodhisattvas compared to the peacock because he or she can remain without danger among the various sufferings of saṃsāra and the various circumstances, the various conditions which in ordinary people stimulate delusion, give rise to delusion. And so the bodhisattva not only can remain safe among these circumstances which would be too dangerous for others but they can actually use other words, can use these circumstances in the path. They can, by being in contact with the circumstances that normally in sentient beings give rise cause them to give rise to anger or attachment, desire or aversion, they the bodhisattvas instead of that actually are able to make their practice stronger and they’re actually able to advance on the path through these circumstances.
So they’re able to do this, they’re strong enough to do this because they’ve generated bodhicitta and they have this mind which is really glad, really happy to take on the suffering, the various sufferings for the sake of sentient beings. So for this reason they’re referred to as being brave or dauntless is another translation. So they refer to as being the brave bodhisattvas and this is actually a reference to the Tibetan word for Bodhisattva. So or actually also the Sanskrit word Bodhisattvas are not so good on the Sanskrit but it seems to have a similar connotation. So in Tibetan it’s called Jangchub Sempa and it’s you know a lot of Tibetan words end in pa and it it just indicates a noun, a masculine noun, but this is a different pa.
It’s spelled differently and it’s actually pronounced differently to the Tibetans. It wouldn’t sound the same. It’s a stronger, longer vowel sound. So this Jangchub Sempa has the pa which comes from pawo, which means hero or or brave being. So you come across this when we do the Guru Puja, you know, we do, you know, the verse inviting all the heroes and heroines to come and partake in the feast offering.
So it invites the the the heroes to to come along with all the other holy beings who are being invited. It’s it’s this word, pawo. And here they’ve taken that syllable, the first syllable from their pa having meaning of being brave. And you find the same in Vajrasattva, Dorje Sempa. It means vajra heroic mind.
So it’s not the ordinary Pa, it’s this Pa meaning brave. And so we’re talking about these Bodhisattvas who had this very brave mind, this heroic mind, and you find that some translators like to translate the the term Bodhisattva as awakening warrior, which I think is a horrible translation. But it does convey that idea of courage. Actually, reminds me of another story. If I was to tell you the whole of the story from beginning to end, it would help take me the whole session because it was everybody has their worst their worst journey story their worst traveling story.
This is my worst traveling story. Seems like everything went wrong on this journey that could have possibly gone wrong. And it started off with our bus breaking down in the bus station before it even got going. And then it went further with us almost being left behind at a river because we left behind by the bus when we stopped for lunch because we we managed to find it again because it’s gone down to wait at the river for the ferry. And then it went on a bit further with us actually breaking down.
We’re breaking down all the time, like, irregularly all along the road. Finally broke down permanently when we’re in the middle of Bihar. I just start coming on dark in the middle of this remote piece of country and stranded with our bags. And then somehow we managed to get ourselves to the nearest town by hitching a ride on a bus that was also very tremendously funny. And then we managed to get our train, and then somehow we managed to not be informed that we that the train didn’t go all the way to Pathankot and we had to get off at the junction station a few kilometers outside Pathankot and so we didn’t get off at the right station and then we suddenly realized that we were being carried on and the train instead of going on to amritar, suddenly took a left turn and we’re heading off to Kashmir.
And so we got carried off to Jammu. Then we had to get get him get out of Jammu and catch the male train back again. And while we were on the so I’m sorry about all this diversion, but I couldn’t resist telling you the story. And by the time we got back to Pathankot on the mail train, it was too late to catch the bus up, so we had to spend a night in Pathankot and then catch our bus the next day. But while we were on the mail train, there were all these drunken soldiers on board or at least the officer was drunk.
And he he got talking to us and that he there were two of us. There was a a nun from New Zealand and myself. He was saying, oh, I I see you ladies carry your own packs. He said, you’re you’re like soldiers. He said, I’m a soldier.
You’re a soldier. Soldiers always carry their own packs. And so in a way, it just sort of struck a note with us that there was that similarity that in a way you’re not although you’re not fighting the external enemies, you need a lot of the same qualities that applied, yes, internally. But you internally. But you you you still need to have all that sort of determination and courage and also skillful means.
But no matter how determined and brave the soldiers are, if they if they have inferior weapons, they’re going to be shot to pieces. So we have to have good weapons and that’s why we have to be presented by these lineage gurus with these teachings such as this one, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, which give us the effective weapons to to handle the the enemy, which has some pretty good weapons of its own. That’s right. Yes. Yes.
You have to have your equipment. Yes. Have have you have had everything. Yes. Okay.
So that’s right. We do need to have a good range of equipment so that we can sort of handle all different situations of combat that are likely to to be occurring. So that’s that’s another that’s a good point. So the bodhisattva is the heroic being who can handle all of these situations and those who are not bodhisattvas are compared to crows who who can’t handle these these poisons. So they’re referred to as being cowards.
But, actually, it’s it’s not meant to be challenge to rush out and beat the poisons, but it’s meant to recognize the situation. And if if you recognize yourself as being a crow, then you you have to take what’s appropriate for a crow. That’s right. Yeah. So there’s a warning in there too.
So at at various stages of practice. Yes. So I have to recognize what’s appropriate at this stage of practice, and we also hope to develop. So because we’re not bodhisattvas, I’m not really talking about anybody here because you could all be Bodhisattvas as far as I know, but I’m just working on the assumption that if you come along here to listen to these teachings that most likely you’re you’re not quite which could be wrong because somebody might be showing the aspect to some particular reason to help us. So but anyway because we’re not Bodhisattvas we’re endangered by the external factors that are the conditions that give rise to attachment and aversion.
And of course we know worldly life is full of these circumstances. We’re continually encountering circumstances to give rise to attachment and aversion. As it says in me, we fear sufferings and hardships arising in the course of our Dharma practice. So that’s one part of it. And also we’re tempted by the meaning of samsaric pleasures.
So it’s very hard for us to resist an opportunity to enjoy